And the first real Op is over.

Ok, we've gotten the first op over and done. Thanks to George Fox, Cathrianne, and Teena (and qofe and Jonaton 2 alts) for the op. Next op is Thursday.

Hauling and personal development

The last few days, I've been hauling and getting new skills. Just breaking up the monotony of the hauling. I need to see about getting the others to help out more with the hauling.

On the personal development front great strides have been made: I got the last rig for my mammoth. I got the skill for deep space transports. I purchased my first mammoth (22.2k m3 without rigs). I got the other faction racial drone specialization skills. I traded my 2nd Cryptic Tuner Data Interface for a Occult Tuner Data Interface. Typhoon #3 was put up on the market. Typhoon #4 was put up on the market and sold. So overall I really can't complain about the results.

On the flip side I find the lack of initiative in my alliance's pilots disturbing.... Trying to dodge "work" I guess.

Well I got to do some exploration - minor drama

Yesterday was a day for a bit of drama along with some exploration.

The first thing was transporting the minerals for Phoon #3 to Eram (3 trips, I'll be glad when I get those last 17 trit bars and I can make that last rig for my Mammoth.

While this was going on there was a bit of drama between WOJ and Norjia about the way that Norjia runs her corp. As per alliance policy I'm staying out of that one.

I finally got tech 2 Rocket launchers and immediately started learning the skill necessary for the tech 2 ammo. I upgraded my two jags and proceeded to go try out the results. Not massively more deadly but it does take care of cruisers spawns. As part of this I managed to find the place to go farm the tech 2 data interface manufacturing components in the ANI constellation. Tvink is just a little to hot with BS data guards at the end. Going to need some help on that one at some point. But this allowed me to confirm that the components do indeed drop here and it is farm-able by a Jaguar. Love that ship.

Then I managed to find a Radar ping in Uttindar. The tracking down of the site was broken by the server going down. Everyone did mention that eve did seem a little laggy but oh well.

After the server came back up I managed to finish exploring the site. Got some trit bars and 5 decryptors.

Oh and Guyverman finally got above 5. Then he started making plans in his head about putting a tower in Aeddin....... I almost hated to smash his illusions but Aeddin is a 0.6 system and his standing is only at 5.14...... But he can put it in Gulfonodi or some other 0.5 system if he ever gets his own tower. We'll see.

Signing off and fly safe.

Tonight I need to get scouting for a mining site since no one has stepped up to the bat and volunteered to go scouting. I think I'll call for scouts tonight.

We'll see how it goes...

Recon Week

This week is going to be the build up to bi-weekly alliance mining ops. These ops are geared to killing a few birds with that single stone.

1. 1) getting the pilots of the different corps to work together.
2. 2) getting the minerals into the mineral bank so we have alliance level mineral reserves for mineral projects.
3. 3) train a new generation of miners/hauler how to strip a system properly with a minimum of fuss.

To do this conveniently, as I have stated, we need to find systems that meet fairly stringent constraints.

1. We need a 0.5 or 0.6 system. Anything higher does not contain enough of the better minerals.
2. We need to determine who has perfect refines (defined as 0% tax 0% waste for all high sec ores). We need to know which NPC corporations they have perfect refines at. This will put a range limitation on valid systems. The idea here is we don't want to be more than 2 jumps from a system with perfect refines. The refiner doesn't have to be online so long as he logs in relatively regularly.
3. Preferably the system we mine in does not itself have a station.
4. Preferably the system we mine in is not over crowded (no mining in hek - are you crazy?)
5. Preferably the system we mine in has over 12 belts (yea 0.5-0.6 and large belt count will restrict our choices).

Operating procedure:

• Startup
• A Mining boss will get the ball rolling. He will be designated the MC for the op (mining commander)
  
• The MC is responsible for scouting/designating the scout to determine which belts to attack and in which order. He is also responsible for choosing which belt on the night.
  
• The MC is responsible for keeping track of who attends the op
• The MC in an OP is like an FC in a fleet. He makes the decisions on which ship mix he needs for his op. Follow his/her orders.
  
• Operations
• This is fairly standard for any miner. We'll refine the details as we get better at it but basically this type of operation is designed to strip a belt. Don't worry too much about asteroid quality. Just cluster in 2's and 3's at strategic locations in a belt. (most belts can be spanned by 3 bookmarks)
• Have specific haulers assigned the the cans at specific spots. They haul the mins from the cans to the station. In the presence of thieves they keep the cans empty and pay attention for flips. Don't get aggro.
  
• Always haul to the MB's designated station - chosen because someone in the alliance has perfect refines there.
• Should the MC need to leave - He formally hands off the Boss-ness to another alliance Mining Boss who will become the new MC. make sure to eve-mail the details of attendence prior to the hand off.
  
• Closing down
• The MC in command when he decides the op has run it's course will call the end of the op.
• The miners will finish up and head on home
• The haulers will haul the last ore to station
• If the refiner is on hand he will refine it at the station otherwise the MC will transfer the ore to the mineral bank's control along with a list of who attended the op (and needs to get paid for the minerals harvested).
• Otherwise the bank will setup a contract so the refiner can get to it next time he logs in. The refiner will then transfer the refined minerals to the bank (either in person or by contract).
  
• Once the minerals are refined the bank will determine the value of the minerals received and will then send isk to all the people that attended the op in proportion to their work. (what to record without going crazy but still allowing for an equitable split needs to be discussed as well as the method of calculating mineral value)
• Thieves
• Till we get enough combat capable pilots in the right ships to setup ambushes we'll be passively resisting the thieves. I.e. don't get killed, reduce exposure by making sure there are more haulers and they keep their designated can locations as empty as possible
• Once we have enough combat recon/fleet recon/stealth bomber pilots we can setup ambushes. Till then don't go gunning. We'll discuss tactics in game.

Thats it for this post.

Making Plans

The shower was good this morning. My brain was engaged on the problems of my alliance. There are a few things to address.

1. The alliance is not gelling. Part of this is the cold water effect of GE. Part of this is the lack of alliance operation.
2. I need help with the hauling. We need to establish some guidelines for hauling. We need that the non-miners develop some hauling skillz.
3. The various large alliance projects of the future will need VAST amounts of minerals at preferably decent rates.

For this to work out we need to start establish a few things.

1. We need to establish 2 fixed days a week for alliance ops. One on a weekend day, one on a weekday.
1. These ops will simply sell the minerals they mine to the alliance at a 10% discount over market prices
2. We need to establish mining leads for these ops and have coordinated perfect refining.
2. We need to establish an alliance mineral bank.
1. This bank needs to operate on the basis that there are minimum levels it needs to maintain of each of the basic minerals.
2. Below these amounts, the minerals are reserved for alliance projects, above these amounts the minerals are for sale within the alliance corporations for corporate projects.
3. These minerals are sold at market prices to the projects or the corps.
4. The profit margin is there for two purposes
1. Pay the haulers (2% of cargo value).
2. Pay alliance expenses (the other 8%).
5. Some mechanism for calculating market mineral value is necessary. And has to be agreed on ahead of time.
6. We need a few people to run this mineral bank - haulers.
3. We need to find out what's happened to our diplomat...

That should be it for now.

The hauling is getting a bit much

I'm going to have to go to a different mechanism for mineral acquisition. Both putting market buy orders and making more use of the contract system. Unfortunately to keep such a system going I'm still going to have to have more isk on hand since I still need the ability to buy off the market to top things up. This means that the total float needs to double or triple for my corp operations. Go me. The level of minerals however seems to feel right.

Here's the situation: With a mineral bunker, it limits my mineral buying to specific points in time. This makes it easy to adjust inventory value - as the new mineral values are averaged with the value of the remaining minerals. This new value then becomes the remaining mineral value for the next cycle. Also it's really easy to work on a restricted float - since you never pass the point you don't have enough isk to fill the bunker - mainly because the bunker is only empties to replace items as they are sold. Course the problem is that production lines stall until the bunker is re-filled. This wasn't bad when a single hauler full of mins could re-fill my bunker but with the increased tempo of sales I'm seeing, it's becoming problematic in that it can take up to 48 hours to fill the bunker now.

This means it's time to diversify my mineral acquisition techniques. I need to put up buy orders. I need get more pro-active on the alliance internal contract basis. Unfortunately these activities tie up isk for protracted periods of time and I can't touch the amount of isk necessary to fill the bunker from it's current value. This is problematic since I'll need to build up my isk reserve for other mineral acquisition techniques. Ah well this problem will solve itself in time. A more pressing problem is one in which the alliance needs to acquire minerals for alliance projects. And move them around. I'm going to have to recruit a member to take care of this from withing the alliance.

Ah well a leader's work is never done.

And the first Phoon is built

The first Typhoon is finally built, I need to put it up on sale and start buying the minerals for the next one. I'll do this once I get the Minmatar BS skill so I can move it to Heimatar where the prices are better. I may even move it down the pipe to Maspah/Berta since that's closer to 0.0/lo-sec.
We'll see.

And the IPO is filled

This went much more quickly than I suspected it would. mind you I don't think it will go as fast when we have the Capital ship fund being raised.

At any rate the BPO is in the oven it will be ready in 11 days. At that point we'll peel off a copy and we'll be able to begin production. I've already got the Mex and Iso necessary, just need to acquire the rest over the next few days